Venus in the Afternoon (Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction)

by Tehila Lieberman

University of North Texas Press

$14.95 List Price

Saturday, November 10

7:00pm

Katherine Anne Porter Prize Reading -Short Fiction Award Winners

Now in it's twelfth year, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction is one of the more prestigious short story collection prizes available to fiction authors. Three recent winners, Tehila Lieberman (2012), Peter Brown (2010) and Michael Hyde (2005) share selections from their winning collections.…

Now in it's twelfth year, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction is one of the more prestigious short story collection prizes available to fiction authors. Three recent winners, Tehila Lieberman (2012), Peter Brown (2010) and Michael Hyde (2005) share selections from their winning collections. The Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction winners present a joint reading!

Saturday, March 23

7:30pm

Casey Cep: Furious Hours

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s …

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.

Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more years working on her own version of the case.

Now Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country’s most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity.

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard she earned an M.Phil. at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among many other publications. This is her first book.

Monday, March 25

7:30pm

Ian Frisch: Magic Is Dead

Magic Is Dead is Ian Frisch’s head-first dive into a hidden world full of extraordinary characters and highly guarded secrets. It is a story of imagination, deception, and art that spotlights today’s most brilliant young magicians—a mysterious society known as the52, who are revolutionizing an ancient…

Magic Is Dead is Ian Frisch’s head-first dive into a hidden world full of extraordinary characters and highly guarded secrets. It is a story of imagination, deception, and art that spotlights today’s most brilliant young magicians—a mysterious society known as the52, who are revolutionizing an ancient artform under the mantra Magic Is Dead.

Ian brings us with him as he not only gets to know this fascinating world, but also becomes an integral part of it. We meet the52’s founding members—Chris Ramsay, Laura London, and Daniel Madison—and explore their personal demons, professional aspirations, and what drew them to their art. We join them at private gatherings of the most extraordinary magicians working today, follow them to magic conventions in Las Vegas and London, and discover some of the best tricks of the trade. We also encounter David Blaine, a close friend of Madison’s; hang out with Penn Jillette; and meet Dynamo, the U.K.’s most famous magician. Magic Is Dead is also a chronicle of magic’s rich history and how it has changed in the internet age, as the young guns moves away from the old-school take on the craft.

As he tells the story of the52, and his role as its most unlikely member, Ian reveals his own connection with trickery and deceit, how he first learned the elements that make magic work from his poker-playing mother, and recalls their adventures in card rooms and casinos after his father’s sudden death. “Magic—the romanticism of the inexplicable, the awe and admiration of the unexpected—is an underlying force in how we view the world and its myriad possibilities,” Ian writes. As his journey continues, Ian not only becomes a performer and creator of magic, he also cements a new brotherhood, and begins to understand his relationship with his father, fifteen years after his death. Written with psychological acuity and a keen eye for detail, Magic Is Dead is an engrossing tale full of wonder and surprise.

Ian Frisch has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, the Washington Post Magazine, Playboy, Longreads, and Vice. He was shortlisted for the 2016 Associated Press Sports Editors Explanatory Award, and has made numerous appearances on Bloomberg Television. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tuesday, March 26

7:30pm

Clive Thompson: Coders w/ Anil Dash

Programmers are among the most quietly influential people on the planet, and any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences. Clive Thompson takes readers close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning…

Programmers are among the most quietly influential people on the planet, and any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences. Clive Thompson takes readers close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women.

Who exactly are the coders building today’s world? When most are college-educated, white men, how does that impact the digital world they are building? For example, if women or people of color had been involved in the early days of Twitter, would their experiences with bullying have shaped how the platform dealt with cyberbullying? Thompson also examines the intersection of coding and groundbreaking developments in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and virtual reality.

Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

Anil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly community where millions of creators collaborate to discover and create apps together. He is recognized as one of the most prominent voices advocating for a more humane, inclusive and ethical technology industry through his work as an entrepreneur, activist and writer. Dash also hosts Function, a podcast exploring how tech is shaping culture and society, which leapt into the top 5 technology podcasts in Apple's store just after its launch in 2018.

Wednesday, March 27

7:30pm

Bryan Washington: Lot w/ Jia Tolentino

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.…

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Bryan Washington has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She grew up in Texas, went to University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Trick Mirror, her first essay collection, will be published by Random House in 2019.

Thursday, March 28

7:30pm

Duncan Hannah: 20th Century Boy w/ Gerry Howard

Celebrated painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. …

Celebrated painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade, Twentieth-Century Boy is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place. Full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, fantastically good music, and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum, and featuring cameos from David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and many more, it is a rollicking account of an artist’s coming of age.

Duncan Hannah was born in Minneapolis in 1952. He attended Bard College from 1971 to 1973 and Parsons School of Design from 1973 to 1975. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Art Institute. Twentieth Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies is his first book.

Gerry Howard is executive editor and vice president of Doubleday Books. He received the 2009 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction, and has worked over the years with authors such as Paul Auster, Chuck Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Pat Barker, and Hanya Hanagihara. Howard’s essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Tin House, American Scholar, London Review of Books, n+1, Salon, and other publications.

Mar 29 - 31, 2019

Festival Neue Literatur 2019: In Memory We Trust

FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR brings New York audiences new writing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, as the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and American fiction. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Festival Neue Literatur. The theme of the 2019 festival …

FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR brings New York audiences new writing from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, as the first and only festival to spotlight German-language and American fiction. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Festival Neue Literatur. The theme of the 2019 festival is IN MEMORY WE TRUST curated by literary critic, writer and translator, Liesl Schillinger and Tim Mohr, celebrated German-language translator and author of Burning Down the Haus.

The writers and publishing luminaries featured this year─ Jennifer Croft, Stefanie de Velasco, Daniela Emminger, Laura Freudenthaler, Dana Grigorcea, Pierre Jarawan, John Keene, Min Jin Lee, Gianna Molinari, Idra Novey, Karen Phillips, and Jenny Zhang─ find truths that explain and define their characters and cross borders of time and place to create ageless maps of identity and connection.

Participating Authors:

Stefanie de Velasco (Germany): is a regular contributor to publications such as Zitty, FAZ, and die Zeit, and her debut novel, Tigermilch, was published in 2013 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. It was translated into multiple languages, including English (as Tiger Milk), and adapted into a feature film.

Daniela Emminger (Austria): author of Kafka mit Flügeln and Gemischter Satz, which was on the longlist for the Austrian Book Prize 2016. Daniela lives and works as a writer and freelance journalist in Vienna. She has received various scholarships and awards.

Laura Freudenthaler (Austria): author of the story collection Der Schädel der Madeleine, the novel Die Königin schweigt, which was awarded the Förderpreis zum Bremer Literaturpreis 2018 and recommended as best German debut at the Festival du Premier Roman 2018 in Chambéry. This month, Laura published her second novel Geistergeschichte.

Dana Grigorcea (Switzerland): author of the novel Baba Rada, Life is Temporary and So is The Hair on Your Head, which was awarded the Swiss Literary Pearl. Grigorcea was awarded the 3sat Prize in Klagenfurt at the Ingeborg Bachmann competition 2015 for An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence, which is to be published in April 2019 by Seagull Books.

Pierre Jarawan (Germany): has won international prizes as a slam poet, received the City of Munich literary scholarship (the Bayerische Kunstförderpreis) for The Storyteller, to be published by World Editions in April 2019, and was chosen as Literature Star of the Year by the daily newspaper AZ.

Gianna Molinari (Switzerland): works as a programming assistant at the Solothurn Literary Forum. In 2012, Gianna received a grant to attend the authors’ workshop Prosa at the Literarischen Colloquium Berlin and won the jury prize and audience prize at the 17th MDR Literary Competition that same year. In 2017, she won the 3sat Prize in Klagenfurt for an excerpt from her debut novel, Everything Is Still Possible Here.

List of Events:

FNL 2019 EVENTS LINE-UP

All FNL events are free and in English. RSVPs are required due to limited seating. Go to bit.ly/inmemorywetrust:

The festival's signature translation event returns and pays homage to writers who translate and translators who write. On this very topic, the celebrated novelist and literary translator Idra Novey remarked in an essay entitled Writing While Translating that, "to begin writing after translating is to begin airborne—suspended between languages—a reckless place I’d like to believe leaves a writer’s mind particularly open to innovation not just with word choice, but with tone and irony and all the other subtle, stylistic aspects that add up to what we call a writer’s voice."

Featuring: Idra Novey, John Keene and Jennifer Croft. Moderated by Karen Phillips of Words Without Borders.

SATURDAY, MARCH 30, 6PM, POWERHOUSE (28 Adams Street, Brooklyn)

Another Country: Distant Lands Up Close and Personal

How does the interplay of geography and time alter the identity of a person, a character, a city, a nation? The lives we lead, wherever we live, are shaped by events that happened before we were born, not necessarily in our own countries. To understand who we are, we need to understand who we were, and where we came from. In this panel, we speak with four novelists whose books travel to foreign lands, delving into past events, personal and political, mining memory, and exposing buried clues that define their characters in the present. Is it dangerous to romanticize distant countries, vanished people, and past times? Or can it be cathartic; a way to inhabit the present more fully and meaningfully?

The six German-language authors of Festival Neue Literatur pair up with NYC actors to give a sampling from their work, providing a taste of new writing from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

Featuring Daniela Emminger, Laura Freudenthaler, Pierre Jarawan, Stefanie de Velasco, Dana Grigorcea, and Gianna Molinari, and moderated by the festival curator Tim Mohr. English excerpts will be read by the actors Adelind Horan and Robert Lyons.

SUNDAY, MARCH 31, 6PM, McNally Jackson (52 Prince Street, Manhattan)

Ghosts in the Machine: Haunted Memories and Reimagined Futures

How would living under Communism have shaped your identity? What about being the child of Jehovah’s Witnesses; or being a deceived wife; or living in the continual (and reasonable) fear of attack by a ravenous wolf? Perhaps, if you were affected by such conditions, you could ignore the “monster in the house,” and form successful friendships, relationships and careers. Then again, your experience with that fraught backdrop might linger, stretching into future generations. In this panel, we speak with four authors whose novels and short stories bring to life the specters that haunt them — some political, some familial, some ineffable. These ghosts in the machine have colored their characters’ views of themselves and the world around them. We explore the question of how those who form their selfhood in the shadow of dark influences can use memory to illuminate their reality and liberate their truth.

Featuring Laura Freudenthaler, Gianna Molinari, Stefanie de Velasco and Jenny Zhang, and moderated by the novelist and Festival Neue Literatur chair John Wray.

ABOUT FESTIVAL NEUE LITERATUR: Festival Neue Literatur (FNL) is a collaborative project of New York’s leading German-language cultural institutions: the Austrian Cultural Forum, the German Consulate General New York, the Consulate General of Switzerland, Columbia University School of the Arts, Deutsches Haus at NYU, the Frankfurt Book Fair New York, and the Goethe-Institut New York. All FNL events are free of charge, though RSVPs are required due to limited seating.

Festival Neue Literatur 2019 is made possible through the generous support of the German Federal Foreign Office, Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the German Academic Exchange (DAAD), Esterhazy Winery, and Radeberger Gruppe.